SANA, Yemen — At least nine people from a single family were killed when what appeared to be an airstrike by the Saudi-led military coalition struck a home in a village outside Sana, Yemen’s capital, officials said Saturday.
Village residents gave a higher toll, saying that as many as 11 members of the Okaish family, including five children, were killed in the bombing on Friday. The airstrike may have been intended for an air defense base about a mile and half away, a Yemen Interior Ministry official said.Meanwhile, in Asia, the United States is encouraging its ally, Japan, to abandon its U.S.-drafted pacifist constitution so it can offload some of the cost of militarily containing China, something the country's ultra-nationalist prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has been more than willing to do, fond as he is of his nation's much maligned war criminals. Some still remember history, however, and are warning against this. Again, in the Times, "Retired Japanese Fighter Pilot Sees an Old Danger on the Horizon":
“I fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the faces of those I killed,” said Mr. Harada, who said he was able to meet and befriend some of his foes who survived the war. “They were fathers and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.”
“That is how war robs you of your humanity,” he added, “by putting you in a situation where you must either kill perfect strangers or be killed by them.”
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“I realized the war had turned me into a killer of men,” he said, “and that was not the kind of person I wanted to be.”
A
theocracy that casts itself as "resistance" power, albeit one that
helped Israel help the United States help the counter-revolutionary
Contras in Nicaragua, is now being governed by social justice warriors. "Iran Will Allow Women in Sports Stadiums, Reversing a Much-Criticized Rule":
A Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports official told the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency that women and their families would be allowed to attend most athletic events, except for those of “masculine” sports, like wrestling or swimming, during which male athletes wear uniforms or suits that cover little of their bodies.Speaking of the Islamic Republic, one of the more curious things to me is that the recently agreed upon framework for a deal with Western powers over its nuclear program is that members of United Against Nuclear Iran, a billionaire-backed alarmist group that many have perceived as an Israeli proxy, are cautiously supportive even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bellowing that the deal threatens the whole existence of his white supremacist settler colony:
The Iranians won the right to research, but not to use more modern machines for production for the next 10 years.
At Arak, which officials feared could produce plutonium, another pathway to a bomb, Iran agreed to redesign a heavy-water reactor in a way that would keep it from producing weapons-usable fuel.
Those conditions impressed two of the most skeptical experts on the negotiations: Gary Samore and Olli Heinonen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and members of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran.
Mr. Samore, who was Mr. Obama’s top adviser on weapons of mass destruction in his first term as president, said in an email that the deal was a “very satisfactory resolution of Fordo and Arak issues for the 15-year term” of the accord. He had more questions about operations at Natanz and said there was “much detail to be negotiated, but I think it’s enough to be called a political framework.”I realize all these stories are from the Times. What can I say? They had a good week. I'll do better next time.
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